Excel vs Workfront

[DagmaraGa]

We're currently looking at trying to drive more of our project finances through Workfront and step away from separate Excel based budget tracking sheets. The benefits of making this step are quite obvious to us. e.g. Easier to access and share data, project finance information held in one system, useful reports & dashboards, visibility to senior management etc. At the moment finance tracking in Workfront seems like a bit of a minefield to us. We started to test this during last year but ended up with more questions than answers. We'd really like to learn from other organisations that have gone through this process and find out if we've missed a trick. The transition currently feels quite daunting and fiddly to manage so any help, tips or advice would be greatly appreciated. We have many, many question about this topic. Below are some examples: Do other organisations track project budgets fully in Workfront? What capabilities are there for programme budget tracking? How do other organisations track actual spend vs budgets in Workfront? How do organisations produce accurate forecasts in Workfront. Can manual variances be used? What common financial reports and dashboards do your Project Managers and Programme Managers use? Are there any custom fields required to set this up? How is budget vs spend (on both expenses and resources) pulled together to give a nicely formatted top level view for Project Managers, Programme Managers, Sponsors, Senior Management etc. What challenges have other organisation had to overcome in order to successfully implement budget tracking via Workfront? How was the adoption experience across users? Is this an improvement on the budget tracking method that your organisation used previously? Thanks for reading this query and for any information in advance. Dagmara Garwell BAKKAVOR LTD

[EricLu2]

Hi: Do other organisations track project budgets fully in Workfront? We track the project baseline in WorkFront Рwhich to us means the last approved project plan. Any time we get an approved change to a project, we snap a new baseline; We track the current forecast in WorkFront Рthat's the task plan; We track everything else outside of WorkFront, in Excel, actually; What capabilities are there for programme budget tracking? None that we can tell. What we do to get around that is create a program-forecast project plan in the program and use it to hold budgetary estimates. When we start a project, we decrement this program-forecast project plan, so the overall rolled-up cost of the program remains the same. That program-forecast project plan is a bucket of money, essentially. We take money out of the bucket so the net cost of all elements of the program remain constant. We have a number of reports that roll up the sum total of the various types of money in all of the projects within the program. How do other organisations track actual spend vs budgets in Workfront? Because of the way our financial organization tracks project cost in the financial system, there is an ambiguity that prevents us from knowing, in the finance system, whether a particular cost is associated with one project or another. They have us used generic activity codes on multiple projects, but the finance system only knows the generic activity code, not the project that generated that expense. We can't go backwards from the accounting system back to WorKFront; We use WorkFront as the system of record for hours, not dollars; How do organisations produce accurate forecasts in Workfront. Let's take that in two parts: How do we produce forecasts? How do we know they are accurate? How do we produce forecasts? A forecast, to us, is the combination of the labor cost and material expenses; We create a forecasted project during planning at the end of the year, and that project holds the high level estimates for labor and material cost; That allows us to roll up the aggregated forecasts of all projects within a portfolio, and that forecast aligns with our approved budget for a given year; When, in the following year, we are ready to start a project, we create the task plan for the project in the forecasted project plan and delete the forecast line items (tasks) from the project; In this way, we can always roll up a portfolio to see what the forecasted cost will be, and compare it to the rolled up Baseline cost to see the variance; How do we know it is accurate? We guess, like everyone else. We don't use a rigid forecasting methodology, like Function Point Analysis; We have templates we use that rather much guide people down a common path to creating a task plan, but in the end, we are using calibrated eyeball forecasted; Can manual variances be used? Not sure what a manual variance is. We compare the baseline (last approved) to the current forecast; That tells us the variance we are most interested in Рthe difference between the amount of money/hours approved and the amount currently forecast; What common financial reports and dashboards do your Project Managers and Programme Managers use? Commonly used reports are: Comparison of baseline to current forecast (this is actually complicated because we have difference kinds of money РOpEx and CapEx); Rolled up labor forecast by Portfolio, by program, and by project (three separate reports) РThis is complicated because of the different kinds of money; Rolled up material forecast by Portfolio, by program, and by project (three separate reports); Actual Variance report РThis shows us where we have spent more money than authorized; Planned Variance report РThis shows us where we plan on spending more money than authorized; Are there any custom fields required to set this up? Yes, we have a custom attribute to tell us whether the task models Operating Expense work, or models capitalizable work. We do not co-mingle opex and capex work on a single task; How is budget vs spend (on both expenses and resources) pulled together to give a nicely formatted top level view for Project Managers, Programme Managers, Sponsors, Senior Management etc. We do that in Excel, because we haven't figured out how to get two distinctly different objects in the same report. I can't get task labor and material expense details on the same report; We have a dashboard, but still shows material and labor separately; We do have reports that show the sum total of labor and material, but there is no way in that report to show OpEx labor and CapEx labor, because it used the built-in sum total fields; What challenges have other organisation had to overcome in order to successfully implement budget tracking via Workfront? Our project costing paradigm creates an ambiguity that keeps us from bringing actuals from the accounting system back into WorkFront; WorkFront does not support time-based cost per hour/rates. That means if I have an employee who gets a promotion and their rate increases on 01JAN2018, there is no way to show that their cost/hour was rate A in 2017, but is now rate B in 2018. This is the key reason why we don't use WorkFront as the system of record for project cost. It doesn't impact our ability to model forecast or budget, but it definitely keeps us from having usable Actual numbers; How was the adoption experience across users? Poor Is this an improvement on the budget tracking method that your organisation used previously? Previously, they used Excel and extracts from the financial system. Many vocal opponents of WorkFront say using Excel was way better, much easier. Only those with experience in project costing, or in project management in general, understand that without WorkFront, our data has no credibility; ------Original Message------ We're currently looking at trying to drive more of our project finances through Workfront and step away from separate Excel based budget tracking sheets. The benefits of making this step are quite obvious to us. e.g. Easier to access and share data, project finance information held in one system, useful reports & dashboards, visibility to senior management etc. ¬† At the moment finance tracking in Workfront seems like a bit of a minefield to us. We started to test this during last year but ended up with more questions than answers. We'd really like to learn from other organisations that have gone through this process and find out if we've missed a trick. The transition currently feels quite daunting and fiddly to manage so any help, tips or advice would be greatly appreciated. ¬† We have many, many question about this topic. Below are some examples: ¬† Do other organisations track project budgets fully in Workfront? What capabilities are there for programme budget tracking? How do other organisations track actual spend vs budgets in Workfront? How do organisations produce accurate forecasts in Workfront. Can manual variances be used? What common financial reports and dashboards do your Project Managers and Programme Managers use? Are there any custom fields required to set this up? How is budget vs spend (on both expenses and resources) pulled together to give a nicely formatted top level view for Project Managers, Programme Managers, Sponsors, Senior Management etc. What challenges have other organisation had to overcome in order to successfully implement budget tracking via Workfront? How was the adoption experience across users?¬† Is this an improvement on the budget tracking method that your organisation used previously? ¬† Thanks for reading this query and for any information in advance.

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Dagmara Garwell
BAKKAVOR LTD
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[JohnHo]

Hello Dagmara, We are a professional services organization. We enter time and bill out of our accounting system. We then feed that data over to Workfront. We do not want our employees double entering time and expense into both systems. So we accomplish hour and cost budgets a few ways. If anyone has any other ideas I am open to it. On the project level, we created custom fields for budgeted hours and budgeted dollars (amount we are invoicing our clients). We created the budgeted dollars column vs. using the delivered budget column as we have a lot of project managers. Only planner license types can update the delivered field and workers can update the custom field. We created the budgeted hours custom field for a reason that I will explain in the tasks section. On the project level, we created a custom field called budgeted hours by person. We also created a custom field called task type. For these tasks, we set the task type to a value called budgeted hours. We created the custom budgeted hours field, b/c we needed to set a baseline for what the actual contractual hours are. We encourage our users to adjust the planned hours from the starting plan based on how complex or less complex the task is and how long it takes to complete. The main reason we ask our users to do this is to drive future resource forecasting. We looked into the baseline feature to capture the original plan. This was helpful, however, we often get change orders which changes the budget . . if I rebaseline, it will overwrite the original plan with whatever the new planned hours are (which our users may of changed). This is also the reason we created the budgeted hours field on the project level. Since on the project level I cannot summarize custom task fields and show that on a dashboard (or at least I don't think we can). Now that all of that is set, I load data from my accounting system weekly 1) Hours - I am able to link the WF Project ID, WF User ID, and WF Task ID to my accounting systems project/task/user on their timesheet. I load these each Monday. 2) Invoices - each month, my team sends me the invoices we created and I load those as Expenses with an Expense type of "Invoice" 3) Project Invoices, each week, I project the cost of the hours that my team entered but are not yet invoiced (my accounting system knows our bill rates) and load those as Expenses with an Expense type of "Projected Invoice". I delete the projected invoices once we really invoice. I know this sounds complicated, but the weekly process takes about 10 minutes and there is a little extra work to setup the tasks correctly at the beginning, but what it does give us is: - ability to report on budget to actual dollars - ability to report on budget to actual hours at the project level - ability to report on budget to actual hours at the person level Present all of this information to our users on reports and graphs. It really helps our consultants to understand their burn rates. John Hoebler

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Dags. In addition to Eric's and John's thorough responses, but (especially via iPhone) tempering mine for brevity; we've helped our Workfront based "http://www.espsuite.ca">ESP for Oil and Gas clients manage their ($100M+) annual capital budgets through Workfront for many years it does require a significant amount of custom data, but (the end justifying the means) gives them 5 years+ of projections we use baselines to capture the moment; but also a number of sophisticated calculations to take the Best Number Available (eg Actual, else Field Estimate, else AFE amount, else Budget), as well as combining those Year To Date numbers with the remaining Budget (or latest Forecast; typically the latest of up to four Quarterly revisions) for efficiency's sake, we use Excel to (quickly) make revisions and then upload the changes into Workfront using our "http://store.atappstore.com/product/excel-updater/">Excel Updater solution Regards, Doug Doug Den Hoed - AtAppStore Got Skills? Lend a hand! https://community.workfront.com/participate/unanswered-threads

[JillAc]

I am very interested in this topic as I can't quite figure it out. Also, there is a nomenclature issue that comes up with the word "budget" which almost always, in WF, seems to point toward budgeted hours and timesheets and such. What I want to do is to put in the budget for the project – not in terms of hours, but how much it costs to print the thing, buy the thing, pay the vendor for the thing. Does this case you are talking about refer only to people-budget ie their billing hours? Jill Ackerman | Director, Direct Marketing Lindblad Expeditions 96 Morton Street | New York, NY 10014 Ph. 212.261.9080 | Fax. 212.265-3770 jilla@expeditions.com | "http://www.expeditions.com/"> www.expeditions.com

[EricLu2]

Hi: Here is how I define the terms, for right or wrong: Budget – This is how much money is allocated to the project. This number, for us, comes out of a high level planning exercise. We suggest they allocate a certain amount for projects, they tell us how much they have set aside for the work, and that is our budget. We don't have authority to spend that money, but we know they've got it pigeon-holed for this work; Forecast – This is how much money we THINK we are going to need – We submit a detailed forecast based on a task plan and when we get authority to spend it, we snap a baseline; Projected – This is how many hours (and by extension, money) we are likely to need given our current burn rate. WorkFront calculates projected hours and we convert that to dollars; Baseline – This is how much money we have approval to spend. We update this baseline any time we have an approved change request; Actual – This is how much money we have actually spent. The fun comes in comparing them to determine variances, and, why we have variances. Does that help? Thanks, Eric

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Jill, For Oil & Gas, my definitions relating to budget are slightly more nuanced than Eric's, but conceptually, we agree: in particular, that the Budget is at the Project level. In case you're interested, though....an Oil & Gas Capital Budget Project is typically: comprised of several major components (e.g. Drill = $2M, Completion = $1M, Tie In = $3M, etc.) combined, those components yield the Total Gross Budget (e.g. $6M) each component can also be "joint ventured" (with other business partners); e.g. 80% Doug, 20% Jill so for each component, each Gross entry also has a calculated Net entry (e.g. Drill = $2M * 80% = $1.6M, etc.) likewise, there is a Total Net Budget (e.g. $4.8M) because each of these Net numbers are stored independently at the Project level, we can then pull them down to the appropriate task doing so then allows us to generate a DOLLAR based Gantt Chart for each Project and combine those Projects into a single report (e.g. by Portfolio) and aggregate those dollars into a cumulative "burn up" report and manage your entire company budget in Workfront especially with our "http://store.atappstore.com/product/ubergantt/">UberGantt solution (see below) Regards, Doug Doug Den Hoed - AtAppStore Got Skills? Lend a hand! https://community.workfront.com/participate/unanswered-threads

[JasonMa]

Like others here, we do all "real" budgeting and expense tracking in a separate financial system but use Workfront to track the forecasting, budgeting, and expense tracking at a project level. This is for two reasons: 1) our financial system doesn't allow for tracking at the project level (it just knows account numbers and doesn't do in-project projections); and 2) putting it in Workfront at least gives us a single pane of glass for the project's health. We do our initial budget forecasting as part of business case development in Workfront. Once that is confirmed with annual budget approval, those numbers are updated and then a baseline taken on the project prior to flipping to Kicking-Off. There are multiple entries on the expense tab for budgeted items. These, however, are often high level. So, for example, we may have a single line for our Consulting account for the project but we may end up using multiple consultants. In this case, we would typically create another entry on the Expense tab for each but instead of putting in a Budgeted amount we would enter a Planned amount. The Budgeted number should in theory NEVER change but the Planned will fluctuate with the most up-to-date projections the PM makes during the project. As we get invoices in from vendors, we create another line item on the Expenses tab for each Actual amount, typically one per Invoice (though a single invoice could hit multiple accounts so there could be more than one Actual entered for an invoice since you can't divide up a single line entry in WF to different accounts). Ideally, at the end, the Budgeted, Planned, and Actual will all match. Now, I wrote all this up to demonstrate my biggest challenge with WF Expenses: These line items don't REALLY connect to each other in any way. Sure, you can create a Grouping on the report to group all the Accounts together but there is still no connection between a Budget entry, a Planned Entry, and the Actuals. So, you can't click on a Budgeted entry and see how your invoices have chipped away at it. Where as an actual financial system would be in a relational database and these things, in theory, would actually connect and have meaning. In that regard, Expense tracking in Workfront is no better or worse than Excel because YOU still have to do all the work to make sense of it. YOU still have to do all the sorting and grouping and analysis where is a true financial system would build those relationships for you. So, as far as knowing at a high level whether your project is in good financial health, it's fine. But, I couldn't imagine trying to do it for a project that would have hundreds of entries as I find it vexing when I only have 10 or 12 entries. Jason Maust McGuireWoods LLP

[EricLu2]

Hi: As I read Jason's post (Thanks, Jason!), I am reminded of a discussion I had with Steve Zobell a few years ago on this very topic (before the Idea Exchange). In the discussion, I discussed elements of a Financial Project Costing system that would be advantageous to include in the product. It would simplify integration to a real Financial Project Costing system, and for those without a project costing system, it would add a lot of value. After discussing those project costing functional elements, Steve said that (at that point) they did not intend on WorkFront being a Project Costing system. Many of the budget / money management features we need are not found in WorkFront, a Work Management system. They would be found in a Project Costing system that bolts onto your Accounting System. Many Work Management systems have limited project costing functionality. I am going to bet at this point, if you needed project costing and budget management capabilities, you would be encouraged to buy it and bolt it onto WorkFront using Fusion. Or use Excel. ��

[DagmaraGa]

Thanks all your feedback and ideas received so far! i guess we're all at the same page and thinking at the moment... Does anyone one know which system available within Fusion are good project costing system? Is anyone currently using any o them ? Thanks, Dags Dagmara Garwell BAKKAVOR LTD

[EricLu2]

Project Costing systems/modules are normally part of a larger accounting package. I've never looked for a stand-alone project costing system. In the past, work management systems I've used had enough project costing features that we didn't need to buy a project costing module for our accounting system (except MS Project, cough cough). Eric